Hi! My name is Andrew Stone and I’m currently a philosophy PhD student at the University of Chicago. Not only do I have a philosophical interest in games, but I am also an avid game player and aspiring game designer. My favorite games tend to be abstract strategy games like chess and go. I’ve created this blog as a place to collect my thoughts about games, thoughts that might be about particular games, games in general, or something else that I see as somehow relating to games. I may also document some of my own attempts at game design.
The title of the blog is a play on “game theory,” a subject that also interests me philosophically, but doesn’t seem to have much to do with the activity that we refer to as “playing games” in particular. Game theory is about any situation in which an outcome depends jointly on the actions of multiple agents, where each agent may need to take the goals, beliefs, and reasoning of the other agents into account to best achieve their own goals. The games we play with each other are certainly meet this criterion, but so do many other kinds of interactions that we would not classify as games. Still, I suspect game theory and the actual activity of game playing are less far apart than they might seem. Maybe some of the assumptions of game theory implicitly rely on us having games rather than other kinds of interaction in mind, for instance. This is not primarily a blog about game theory, it is about game praxis, the actual activities of game playing and game designing. But as in other domains, there may be some unexpected feedback between theory and praxis here.
GAME PRAXIS 